This Company That Turns Sportswear Into Gourmet Meals

This gourmet meal may have come from recycled sportswear, but don't worry—nobody's going to make you eat your sports bra. Houdini Sportswear, a company based in Sweden dedicated to creating 100 percent biodegradable athletic apparel, has put their products to the test with the new Houdini Menu. Basically, it's a menu comprised of meals they made out of vegetables grown from the composted sportswear.

While delicious gourmet meal is probably not what comes to mind when you think of your sweaty old compression pants, these meals actually look really tasty. Sebastian Thureson, the Houdini Menu's chef, said that his goal was to create dishes that captured the down-to-earth vibe of Houdini's sportswear. The menu includes "Sweet 10k-Fennel with Yogurt, Sorrel, and Och Licorice," "Smoked Merino-Wool-Mushroom Broth with Pickled Egg, Kohl Rabi and Ramson," and "Baked Houdini-Leek with Cress, Dill, and Elderflower." All the menu items are probably a little too delicate to be the food you scarf down after your Houdini-clad workout, but at least they're pretty.

Turns out, designing sportswear that's also fertilizer is no easy feat. It took Houdini Sportswear a few years to figure out the fabric. They ended up with a mixing a variety of biodegradable fibers with merino wool (hence the Merino-Wool-Mushroom Broth).

Courtesy of Carl Larsson / McCann Stockholm / Houdini Sportswear

You can also grow your own sportswear-composted vegetables, if you're into that kind of thing. Houdini sells packs of their soil to anyone who wants to recreate the process. You have to mix the fertilizing soil with normal, not-made-from-sportswear soil. Houdini warns that it's so nutritious that you may overload your plants. The soil is available at their stores around the world: a Salt Lake City store in the U.S., a handful of locations in Canada, and a bunch of stores across Europe.